Diary Prequel Package — page 239

Coast with a concentration in DC. Temps between 92 and 101 F for the past several weeks. Welcome to Washington! Also, over the past 2 weeks I have been informed that I have won the Paul Janssen Prize from Belgium ($100,000.00) (cannot take the money since the prize is sponsored by J & J - what bullshit). Also won the Will Roger Prize for $50,000.00 (yes, I can accept the money). To be given to me in LA - am looking forward to this. This has been a very busy, hot, exciting summer. Am chronically tired, but good things are happening, particularly in the lab (a4B7) and with commentary papers that I am writing including some really nice ones with Gary Nabel on HIV vaccine and universal flu vaccine. Aug. 4, 2010 - Memorial service for Bob Chanock, giant in virology for 50 years at NIAID. Major figure in virology research - discovered M. pneumonia; several parainfluenza viruses, his groups also discovered norovirus (Norwalk agent), made vaccine for rotavirus and hepatitis A, etc. I gave one of the eulogies at his service. Aug. 5, 2010 - Dinner with Larry Corey who has just been offered and accepted President and CEO of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where he has worked for many years. Big career decision regarding his future role in helping lead the HIV vaccine effort as PI of the HVTN. Aug. 18, 2010 - Big controversy regarding the conflicting studies of the role of XMRV (xenotropic mouse leukemia virus-related virus) in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). 2 papers coming out almost simultaneously from FDA (Shy-Ching Lo)/NIH (Harvey Alter) in PNAS and the CDC in Retrovirology. FDA/NIH finds correlation (86% vs 8.% in normals), while CDC finds no correlation. I have been involved in trying to get to the bottom of this prior to publication of the discordant results since we knew of the data before the papers were published. I believe that the FDA/NIH study is contaminated and I do not believe Shy Lo since in the late 1980s he had claimed with what appeared to be fool-proof data that AIDS was associated with a new species of mycoplasma (M. fermentans) as a co-factor. The data proved to be spurious,, but people seem to have forgotten about this. I have convinced Ian Lipkin from Columbia (Mailman School of Public Health) to referee coded sample examination of FDA looking at negative samples from CDC study. The exercise was somewhat inconclusive. Lo does not want to do another study starting with identical CFS samples that are coded together with known normals and known spiked samples to really settle this. The issue is that highly emotional CFS crowd now wants to treat CFS people with anti-retroviral drugs, despite no evidence of causality and several negative studies besides the CDC study. Aug. 19, 2010 - Finally had formal roll-out of the Medical Countermeasure (MCM) review and initiative together with PCAST Report re: 2009 pandemic flu. Roll-out was at HHS led by Secretary Sebelius. I presented the NIH component of the 5 part initiative which is the Concept Acceleration Program (CAP) and the Strategic Investment (SI) program (a 501 3(c) similar to a venture capitol firm). Other initiatives were regulatory Science for FDA, manufacturing capacity, enhance influenza capability (potency assays,